Whatever your musical style, Sibelius 5 makes writing scores a breeze - giving you more time to focus on the music. Stunning features like Panorama mean you don’t need to think about pages while you’re composing or arranging. You can just let you creativity flow. Ideas Hub is a real first for music software. It lets you instantly capture your musical ideas, and then find them again in a second - so you’ll never lose another idea. Plus high-quality, built-in sounds play back your scores with astounding realism, because there’s no better way to perfect your music than by hearing it.

You can create audio files which can be converted to MP3s or burned to CD, produce instrumental parts effortlessly, compose for video, sell your music online and do hundreds of other things you might never have dreamed of.

Sibelius is so easy to learn and use that you can start writing your first piece within minutes – not days! Discover the joys of writing music with a program that's simple and intuitive. And, of course, being able to change your music in the blink of an eye!

Hear your music

The easiest way to perfect your music is by hearing it. Just click the play button in Sibelius to hear your music performed with surprising realism, thanks to the built-in Sibelius Sounds Essentials library. Sibelius reads, understands and plays back all standard markings, and you can buy extra sound libraries for choral music, world music and more.

The world’s largest sheet music publishers use Sibelius to produce the music you see in the shops. Now you can create the same standard of print-out. And with Sibelius, it’s just so easy.

Sibelius makes producing instrumental parts a joy. In fact, when you start your score,the parts are already there. You can flick between them using a simple drop-down. When you make a change to the full score, the relevant parts are automatically updated, and vice versa.

Ideas are precious. That’s why Sibelius 5 gives you the Ideas Hub - the easy way to capture, tag, find and bring together your musical ideas. With Ideas Hub, you’ll never let another flash of inspiration slip by again.

As well as your own ideas, Ideas Hub comes preloaded with over 2000 ready-made ideas. They cover all styles of music and help provide useful inspiration for your compositions.

As well as printed music, Sibelius publishes beautifully online, too. You can create web versions of scores which can be viewed by anyone using the free Scorch web browser plug-in. And you can easily start selling your scores online via SIbeliusMusic.com.

The Ideas Hub

Ideas Hub is a unique new feature that lets you capture, use and re-use snippets of music. As well as using your own ideas, over 2000 ready-made ones are included – ideal for teaching.

Ideas Hub is a unique new feature that lets you capture, use and re-use snippets of music. As well as using your own ideas, over 2000 ready-made ones are included – ideal for teaching.

Never lose another idea

When writing music you often come up with a bit of melody, rhythm, accompaniment or chord progression with some potential. Now, instead of wondering what to do with it, just tap a key to store it in the ideas Hub. Then you can re-use these ideas later in any score, just like pasting from the clipboard; Sibelius even transposes ideas into the right key and range.

Tag, organize and search

An idea can be a passage of music of any length, any kind and for any number of instruments. Once you’ve captured an idea you can edit it, tag it with your own keywords (e.g. canon, lyrical, riff) to help find it later, or even colour-code it. The Ideas window lets you browse and search through all the available ideas by keyword tags, instrument, time signature, key and so on, and even play them back. Plus, you can export them later to share your ideas with other people.
Ideas genresReady-made ideas for students

Over 2000 ready-made ideas are included for students to use, in a huge range of styles from classical, jazz and band to world music, rock and hip-hop. By using these ideas in their music, students of all abilities can discover how melodies, harmonies and rhythms can be put together to create differing textures and musical structures.

They could start with just one or two ideas for inspiration, or alternatively use ideas as building blocks to create a complete piece. You can keep track of what they’ve done, because Sibelius marks where ideas are used in the score.

If you prefer, you can switch off all of the ready-made ideas, or just give students a few specific ones, for more focused exercises.

Panorama

Panorama is a new, clearer way of viewing music in Sibelius. Instead of being chopped up into systems and pages, the music is shown in a single, infinitely-wide strip – far easier to read and navigate around. So now you can just think about the notes, and forget about page layout until you’re ready to print.

You can switch between Panorama and normal view whenever you like, or use Panorama in combination with Focus on Staves if you just want to look at a few instruments.

As well as allowing you to forget about page layout during composition, Panorama makes the whole experience of inputting music more enjoyable. Because there’s only one system on the page, Sibelius can move smoothly from left to right as you compose, without any disorientating jumps from one system to another. Dragging staves in Panorama won’t affect the layout of the real score. So you really are free to think about your music without any distractions.

Stunning new sounds & playback

Sibelius 5 comes with Sibelius Sounds Essentials as standard – a collection of over 150 pitched and hundreds of percussion sounds, covering a wide range of orchestral, rock & pop, jazz and marching band instruments, plus the full General MIDI set. We’ve selected the sounds from top-name libraries such as Garritan Personal Orchestra, SONiVOX, Garritan Jazz & Big Band, Garritan Concert & Marching Band, M-Audio Session, and Tapspace Virtual Drumline – everything you need to start producing high-quality playback, audio files and CDs.

Sibelius Sounds Essentials plays back using Kontakt Player 2, the very latest version with much improved performance. It can play any number of sounds simultaneously (limited only by your computer), loads them almost instantly, and has extra built-in effects. Any other Sibelius Sounds you have (e.g. Kontakt Gold, GPO Sibelius Edition) will work better than ever, too.

VST & Audio Units

VST (on Windows and Mac) and Audio Units (on Mac only) are state-of-the-art standards for high-quality instrumental sounds. A huge variety of VST and Audio Unit instruments are available from numerous manufacturers – and now Sibelius 5 can play back using any of them! So you’re no longer limited to our sounds – you can now use world-famous ones such as EastWest Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra, Vienna Symphonic Library, Synful Orchestra, and many others. Plus you can use any Kontakt Player 2 or Kontakt 2-format sounds, too.

Many effects to enhance the results (such as advanced reverb, EQ, filters) are also available, which you can chain and mix together. Plus you can use as many different VST or Audio Unit instruments and effects simultaneously as your computer can handle.

Create cues instantly

Creating cues in parts is now the work of a moment. Simply copy the music you want to appear in the cue, and choose Paste As Cue. Sibelius 5 does the rest for you – it makes the cue small, puts it in a suitable voice, transposes it or changes clef as necessary, deletes dynamics and articulations (optional), adds a text label, hides the cue in the score, and stops it playing back. You can even add a cue to multiple instruments at once.

What’s more, there are two new plug-ins to make cueing even easier. Suggest Cue Locations suggests suitable points for cues in your score, based on either the number of bars rest or the duration of a rest in a part, while Check Cues verifies that cues you’ve previously added are still correct, in case you’ve changed the music.

Universal Binary

As usual, Sibelius 5 supports the very latest technologies. It’s now a Universal Binary application, so it runs at top speed on Intel-based Macs. You can use it on the new Leopard operating system (Mac OS X 10.5), and it also has improved tab, mouse and scroll wheel support.
Power tools

• Clefs change where necessary if you switch between sounding pitch and transposing score
• Transpose to specified key (rather than by interval)
• Add blank pages up to next left/right-hand page (for page turns in complex parts)
• Go To Bar steps through each occurrence of the bar number if it recurs in several movements or songs
• Select & delete system/page breaks & other layout marks
• Export graphics in PNG format, plus BMP on Mac too
• Cue-sized graphics
• Graphics scale on small staves
• 400+ different instruments
• Delete Bar menu item
• Select passage by typing bar numbers

Plug-ins

• Make Piano Four Hands Layout splits the music between left- and right-hand pages
• Add Capo Chord Symbols: for guitars with capos
• Add Continuous Controller Changes: produce special MIDI effects for sample libraries
• Groovy Music Mark-Up: for exporting music to Groovy Music educational software
• Improvements to: Accidentals plug-ins, Calculate Statistics, Pitch Mapping, Scales & Arpeggios

Engraving

• Edit aperture of either end of hairpins individually
• Hairpins no longer cross system breaks unnecessarily, and always point the right way after a system/page break
• Hidden music no longer affects visible note stems and rest positions
• Hide empty staves even if they have hidden objects (e.g. cues) on them
• Accidentals now at correct size when normal and cue-sized voices coincide

Text

• Plain & boxed system text styles (for instructions to appear in score & parts)
• Text styles for composer, title etc. on title pages
• You can make text cue-sized
• Correctly number bars split between two systems
• Select all bar numbers on a system using Select More
• Bar number changes automatically centered in the bar when bar numbers are
• Various new & improved characters in various fonts
• Align page-aligned text to margin of first page or current page
• Filter bar numbers and page number changes

Look & Feel

• Fit Page Height zoom level (useful with Panorama)
• Extra tutorial videos covering main new features
• On-screen Reference is now in PDF format – opens faster and easier to read
• Improved dialogs, e.g. Edit Text Style, playback dictionary
• Extra keyboard shortcuts
• New desk textures
• Use different textures when editing ideas
• Texture preview

Playback & MIDI

• Full marching percussion playback (rims, spocks, shots, etc.)
• Show/hide empty staves when importing a MIDI file
• Export Type 0 MIDI files
• Set tick resolution (PPQ) of exported MIDI files
• Choose which sound set to export a MIDI file for
• Multiple input devices – no need to choose which one you’re using
• Alternate pitched & unpitched percussion playback on same staff

Other improvements

• Easier network installation using standard Windows Installer (.msi) package
• Scorch now fully Firefox-compatible on Windows and Mac
• Sibelius files much smaller – about 20K plus typically just 1K per page
• Export in Sibelius 4 format
• Various bugs fixed

System Requirements

PC

• Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista
• 512MB+ RAM
• 350MB hard disk space
• DVD-ROM drive
• You must be running at least Windows XP Service Pack 2 to install and run Sibelius 5. If you have Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000 or Windows NT 4.x, you need to purchase an upgrade to a more recent version of the Windows operating system

Mac

• Mac OS X 10.4 or later
• 512MB+ RAM
• 350MB hard disk space
• DVD-ROM drive
• Sibelius 5 is a Universal application Which means that it runs on both older Macs with PowerPC processors and new Macs with Intel processors.
• If you are running a version of Mac OS X earlier than Mac OS X 10.4, you cannot install and run Sibelius. You may want to upgrade Mac OS X now, although this normally incurs an upgrade fee. See www.apple.com for details